August
10, 2004: In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
wrote of the displaced, Depression-era, Midwestern farming
families who fled to a mythic California in search of a fresh
start and a parcel of dirt. In Broken Heartland,
Osha Davidson also writes—but as journalist, not novelist—of
afflicted Midwestern farming families who lose their land.
But the decade is the '80s not the '30s, and there is no great
migration. Instead the farmers hunker down in the houses that
are left to them and watch as the cherry trees and rhubarb
patches they once tended are bulldozed to make way for corn.
Or they lose the houses too and resort to scouring the roadsides
for aluminum cans, covering eight miles a day for $12. Or
in even more grim scenarios, they lose their land, their houses
and their will to live, and commit suicide, sometimes murder.
In 1987 the suicide rate in Iowa had risen to its highest
level since the Depression. The communities deteriorated,
folding upon themselves with a muted desperation, until they
became what Davidson refers to as “rural ghettos.”

These rural ghettos—the result of the 1980s farm crisis—are
characterized not by bullet-pocked housing projects, but by
boarded-up downtown businesses. In the 1970s, land values
rose and many farmers bought larger acreages and bigger tractors,
all fueled by huge bank loans and government pressure to boost
grain exports (Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz urged farmers
in 1972 to “get big or get out”). But other countries
began producing record crops, and to compete, the U.S. government
lowered its support prices, causing the effective price of
grain to drop. The debt-ridden farmers scrambled to compensate
for the lost income by producing more grain, thus creating
a grain surplus that only exacerbated the falling prices.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates,
so farmers now faced higher payments. And the value of their
land began to slide. It went from crisis to catastrophe. In
1981 the average farm net income in Iowa was $17,680; in 1983
it was -$1,891.

Davidson notes that many farmers prefer the term “farm
condition” to “farm crisis” because the
causes go back hundreds of years, well beyond the Reagan policies
of the 1980s. Davidson traces the roots of the farm crisis
back to the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian conflict over land
ownership (Jefferson advocating ‘yeoman farmers,’
Hamilton for highest-bidders). It is a history of political
wheeling and dealing, with government and industry often strolling
arm-in-arm and hand-in-wallet while orating to the populace
about independence and self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, the fact
that food processors such as Cargill prosper while the farmers
who grow the food itself are going bankrupt “is seen
simply as an inexplicable paradox—one of those quirks
of economic life to be recognized (begrudgingly), stated (infrequently),
and abandoned (quickly)” (p. 31).

While researching and writing Broken Heartland, Osha
Davidson lived in Mechanicsville, Iowa, for three years. The
people he interviewed—hundreds of farmers, pastors,
social workers, storekeepers, and other citizens—stand
vivid and poignant against the backdrop of history and food
policy. A counselor describes how one ten year-old couldn’t
sleep at night because he thought trucks were going to come
take his parents away: “He had, after all, watched strangers
come and take the family hogs” (p. 97). An Iowan Catholic
priest describes how he lent money to a bankrupt farmer so
he could buy his daughter a prom dress; when the daughter
found out what her formerly proud father had done for her,
she drove the family car off a bridge.

The ‘myth of the independent yeoman,’ as Davidson
calls it, doesn’t help the situation. The people most
hurt by lack of regulation and assistance are often the most
fiercely independent. Battered women try to “tough it
out.” Those most victimized by the decisions of their
leaders are the most blindly patriotic. Love It or Leave It,
says the bumper sticker on the repossessed farm truck that
recedes down the dirt driveway.

As a result of the late '70s and '80s spiral into poverty
and desperation, many people turned to hate groups (a trend
similar, though on a smaller and milder scale, to what happened
in pre-World War II Italy and Germany). In an intriguing and
disquieting chapter that opens with an Alice-in-Wonderland
type visit to a Sunday meeting of the “Iowa Society
for Educated Citizens,” Davidson explores the rise of
the NAAWP, Aryan Nation, the Order, Identity, and group leaders
like David Duke, Willis Carto, and Lyndon LaRouche. When Democrats
and Republicans largely ignored the plight of rural Americans,
hate groups stepped into the void, offering detailed—albeit
mostly crackpot—reasons for rural America's deterioration.
In 1978, LaRouche tried to recruit the farmers of the American
Agriculture Movement (AAM), who had descended upon Washington
on their tractors, demanding agricultural reforms. LaRouche
failed when the AAM leadership recognized the iron fist under
his velvet gloves. Considering that hate groups have been
instigators behind terrorist acts like the Oklahoma City bombing,
one might wonder why we hear so little about in the current
“War on Terror.”

Broken Heartland also addresses efforts at “rural
development.” Rural states vie to lure in companies
by offering tax breaks and environmental concessions. But
the companies, which target impoverished communities, pay
low wages, while the profits that were to circulate through
the community instead get exported, in classic colonial fashion.
Often consumer prices increase while the wages of the poor
stay the same. The result is a downward development, which
promotes hog factories that plague communities with unbearable
stench and fouled water, drives residents to seek multiply
low-paying jobs to make ends meet, and begets “cancer
cluster” communities whose habitants have the double
privilege of subsidizing the tax concessions to attract the
companies and then living with the harmful pollution those
companies generate.

Broken Heartland illustrates with intelligence and
sensitivity the need for communal development over blind job
recruitment. Well-funded schools, quality health services,
public spaces, downtown businesses, small and middle-sized
farms—these are some of the veins and capillaries of
a healthy and vigorous town. Without them, aorta or no aorta,
the heart will fail.

Constantine Markides is a freelance writer and novelist
living in Portland, Maine. He can be reached at cons76@yahoo.com